Cartularies

Cartularies

collections of copies of the documents legally registering gifts, primarily of land, for the use of the church in medieval Western Europe. Copies of royal grants and sometimes copies of agreements between secular persons were also included in the cartularies. The copies did not always agree with the originals. The earliest examples of cartularies date to the late seventh and the eighth centuries; they ceased to be compiled in the late 13th and the 14th centuries. The cartularies of the large monasteries often contain thousands of documents. Cartularies are one of the most important sources for the investigation of the social and economic processes of the feudal countryside. Such data as the size and structure of the landholdings of the various social strata, the duties of the peasants, and the means by which the feudal dependence of the peasants was formed can be determined from the cartularies.

In the broadest sense, cartularies were understood in the Middle Ages to be collections of any sort of documents.

Here, Tinti utilizes a remarkable range of sources, including not just the cartularies and charters examined in earlier chapters but also late Saxon church fabric, hagiography, homilies, liturgical manuscripts, and sculpture.

Karl Martell in seiner Zeit (Beihefte der Francia, xxxvii, Sigmaringen, 1994), the number of charters, their production for transactions not involving the church or, indeed, before monasteries were founded, and their use as evidence in court cases, all emerge from the briefest look at Carolingian cartularies.

With Old English there is the additional complication that most of the anchor texts, which are charter boundaries, are not extant in contemporary manuscripts, so one has to keep a weather eye open for possible contamination by cartulary copyists; but that is not usually a problem, because cartularies up to the mid-thirteenth century on the whol e copy tenth- and eleventh-century texts more accurately than do tenth-and eleventh-century literary manuscripts.

In the following article, Professor Epstein uses specific data gleaned from the cartularies of thirteenth-century Genoese notaries to investigate more concretely the uses of time and the structure of the business day in Genoa, He concludes that, in this early center of Western commercial activity at least, an impulse toward greater precision in marking the time of day preceded the arrival of the clock.

The second chapter establishes the purpose of cartularies as mechanisms for communicating and enshrining particular histories by considering composition, copying and dissemination, and subsequent uses of cartularies.

These days, however, documents from monastic cartularies are routinely invoked as (imperfect) windows onto village communities peopled almost entirely by peasants and artisans; windows which allow us to glimpse aspects of daily life and thereby better understand what Wendy Davies has characterized as the <<small worlds>> of medieval Europe (3).

Part 3 introduces the beginner to the major genres of medieval manuscripts: the Bible and related texts, liturgical books and their calendars, Books of Hours, charters and cartularies, maps, and rolls and scrolls.

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